For the first time in my grown-up life Christmas does not feel like an enemy I have had to have fisticuffs with throughout December, but is instead a much anticipated visitor who has arrived in the night bearing gifts of promise and clementines to be eaten in front of wonderful television like The Making of A Lady...
There was something of the blissful this morning, creeping down the stairs before Finley woke up, to switch on the fairy lights and fill the little stocking on his advent calendar with chocolate and a coin. I made coffee and ate crumbled Stilton on warm oatcakes and as it was still so very early and so very, very dark, I curled up under a green patchwork quilt and read by the light of a candle, the rain pattering on the windows my only music and my feet cosily ensconced in leopard skin bed-socks.

I read out loud to myself: a whispered narrative of Victorian Christmas at six o'clock in the morning. For there is a special place in my heart for the Christmas books of yesteryear. For all of those books found on the Gutenberg Christmas book-shelf. Most are chocolate box sweet: sickly and moreish, tinged with melancholia and joy and I simply cannot get enough of them! Some of them I barely understand, and some preach in a fashion I can barely tolerate, but to each of my stolen Christmas mornings, they bring a spoonful of nostalgic magic for the kind of Christmas's that I, as a child of the 1970's could never have really known...